19th century Australian police and commercial photographer

Authorship of Tasmanian Premiers

A significant issue of attribution arises around questions of authorship when two cartes of Tasmanian Premier Sir Richard Dry are compared: one at the State Library of Tasmania is attributed to J.W. Beattie, although his authorship of the original image is impossible in chronological terms; the other at the University of Tasmania is a commercial carte-de-visite taken by Charles A. Woolley ca. 1867 a year or so before Dry’s death in 1869.

The first Tasmanian-born Premier was Sir Richard Dry (1815-1869), and so a significant figure in the State’s political history. This photographic portrait is one of more than 260 held at the State Library of Tasmania of the State’s Parliamentarians. In the same year that J. W. Beattie was engaged in taking a series of portraits of Louisa Anne Meredith – 1895 – he was also preparing these reprints from the work of earlier photographers to complement his composite photograph called “Historical Parliamentary Picture”.

The accreditation as photographer is to John Watt Beattie (1859-1930) despite the fact that the majority of these men of history were dead by the time Beattie had prepared their reprints; Sir Richard Dry died in 1869, as just one example from the series. John Watt Beattie did not arrive in Tasmania until 1878, and was not assigned the commission of government photographer until 1896.

The problem with Beattie’s reprinting for later generations is his lack of accreditation to the photographers whose earlier work provided him with such a lucrative business. This has been the fate of many of the Tasmanian prisoners photographs or “convict portraits” taken by Thomas Nevin in the 1870-1880s. Beattie reprinted them as tourist tokens of Tasmania’s convict “stain” in the 1900s-1920s for sale and display at his convictaria museum, Hobart, assuming that all had been taken at Port Arthur in 1874, a date which appears on the verso of several extant prisoner cartes, when many in fact were taken over a period of several years at the Supreme Court and Hobart Gaol by Thomas and his brother Constable John Nevin. Beattie sourced Nevin’s duplicates from the old photographer’s room at the Hobart Gaol, others from the criminal records held at the Gaol’s Sheriff’s Office, and still more from the Habitual Criminals Register at the Town Hall Police Office. As police records – “booking shots”, “mugshots” or simply criminal identification photographs – their “author” , a literary term some prefer (Reeder 1995) instead of the obvious term “police photographer” – was considered unimportant,then as it is now, irrelevant in fact, that is, until the photographs become an archive in a museum or library collection curated by art-trained photo historians, and then the essentialist notion of “authorship” becomes an issue of aesthetics, and the mugshots become “portraits” e.g. the term is used at the National Library of Australia for their 84 prisoner photographs. Beattie’s commercialism was surely driven by similar interests in aesthetics and historicism in his convictaria venture, and to cinch their sale value, he needed to suppress accreditation to others to better reflect his own talents.

This portrait by Thomas Nevin of W.R. Giblin, who was the Attorney-General at the time of the sitting, escaped Beattie’s reprinting because it was amongst Giblin’s documents held at the Treasury until his death (1887, noted in a letter to The Mercury) when it was returned to the Allport law firm. From the Allport firm it was collected by an associate, retained in the Pretyman Collection and eventually donated to the Archives Office of Tasmania. It bears one of Nevin’s most common commercial studio stamps on the verso, but was catalogued until recently as “Unidentified man” with the reference no: NS 1013/1971. AOT accreditation now includes the subject’s name: W.R. Giblin.

Thomas J. Nevin (1842-1923)

Professional photographer Thomas James Nevin snr (1842-1923) produced large numbers of stereographs and cartes-de-visite within his commercial practice, and prisoner identification photographs on government contract. His career spanned nearly three decades, from the early 1860s to the late 1880s. He was one of the first photographers to work with the police in Australia, along with Charles Nettleton (Victoria) and Frazer Crawford (South Australia). His Tasmanian prisoner mugshots are among the earliest to survive in public collections, viz. the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the Tasmanian Heritage and Archives Office, Hobart; the Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasman Peninsula; the National Library of Australia, Canberra; and the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney. Thomas J. Nevin's stereographs and portraits are held in public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland.

John Nevin snr (1808-1887)

Soldier, journalist, teacher and poet John Nevin snr (1808-1887). in the Royal Scots 1825-1841

Disclaimer

We have not voluntarily contributed to any publication which supports the misattribution of Nevin's prisoner/convict photographs (300+ extant) to the non-photographer A.H. Boyd, nor do we condone any attempts by public institutions or private individuals to co-opt the work on these Nevin weblogs and associated sites to apply the misattribution.

Old Chinese saying: "When you drink the water, remember who dug the well".

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